avhception

Huh, the more you know!

This is an absolutely beautiful story! My mother always whistles back at the birds, but mostly just tries to imitate their songs. But she used to play "Für Elise" on the piano when I was a child :)

I saw that video of the experiment with the thin glass as well, it's been years since then but I still tell people about it. Crows are awesome!

The blog post said bike theft prevention, yes. I'm not familiar with the ways AirTags work, so I had absolutely no idea how "silencing" an AirTag would help with that. I actually came here to the comments in the hopes of finding an explanation (which you thankfully included).

I think they meant it in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in: my private key is "obscure"?

I think you're right, and in addition to that there is also a lot we could do other than AC. Just having some shade from trees already helps a lot. Modern cities can be a man-made hellscape with regards to heat. But we did that to ourselves.

It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.

Very appropriate nickname!

The Supreme Commander community, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, still has an active community here: https://faforever.com/ "Forged Alliance Forever" is also a great mod, balancing changes, game lobbies and whatnot.

When my dad grew up, he wanted to be a locomotive driver. Locomotive drivers were cheered upon by kids and greatly respected. Today, bus drivers complain about kids spitting in their faces. Something went wrong. I'm not sure what.

Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.

Feels like the whole western culture is coming apart (I'm saying this as a European, counting myself as part of the culture as well)

I feel like a lot of the hounding was more due to the fact that Cringely wouldn't admit the failure and instead chose to lie again and again, and less because of the money.

For what it's worth, aside from the hacks I had to apply and having to ignore the webcam, I'm really happy day-to-day with my x13s on Fedora.

I would very much like to believe you, but what about hormones and antibiotics in livestock's diet?

Well, in theory, I don't even care. I want to download an ISO from randomdistro.org and boot it.

Even rather mainstream stuff like the RPi can get wonky in places, and still people comment on why "idiots" buy RPis when this-or-that ARM board has 10% more bang for the buck. Eh, yeah, of course. I'd love to only ever run RandomShenzenCorp's heavily patched vendor kernel from 2016.

I think like you, but they have managed to turned non-lab grown meat into unhealthy slop, too.

I'm sure Claude would be capable to solve many of these. But the next machine probably requires the whole dance all over again, and it just doesn't scale very well, I feel.

I don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x13s Gen1, "21BX000XGE". I really really like the device, best laptop I've owned so far, speaking strictly from a hardware perspective. No vents mean I can use it on a pillow, and it's dead silent. It never runs hot, great battery life. Thin and light, yet has all the performance I need. But would I recommend the laptop to any fellow Linux user? Absolutely not.

Even though it was released in 2022, the webcam still won't work. I can't limit the battery charge to 80% like on my x86 Thinkpad. There was a time when the graphics driver and Chromium didn't like each other and I had to wrangle Chromium into software rendering mode to avoid heavy artifacts on the screen (export force_gl_vendor="notfreedreno"). In fact, I still have the workaround in place. Not sure if it's still needed though. A fix was merged upstream last year, need to check whether it made it into Fedora yet.

I got the machine in 2025, and here are the workarounds and config changes I had to make just to get Fedora running last year, 3 years after release:

- extra kernel arguments ("arm64.nopauth" seems to be needed still in 2026, "clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused" I have been able to remove at some point)

- GRUB config (GRUB_DEFAULT_DTB=/boot/dtb/qcom/sc8280xp-lenovo-thinkpad-x13s.dtb)

- initramfs modification, /etc/dracut.conf.d/x13s_firmware.conf: install_items+=" /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcdxkmsuc8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcadsp8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qccdsp8280.mbn.xz ". Not sure if these are still needed, they were at some point.

In late 2025, installing Fedora was still a pain in the butt. There were custom-built ISOs for my device, but they didn't work because my firmware was too new. Stupid me ran a firmware update on the preinstalled windows. I tried building my own ISO, but the firmware never recognized those as a boot device for some reason (I have successfully built custom ISOs for x86 many times). In the end, I was able to use QEMU + chroot on my x86 machine to install Fedora ARM onto an external HDD, make the needed modifications in there, boot that on the laptop and run the anaconda installer, then make modifications to the install on the internal storage.

I just ran a quick `wc -w` on my installation and debug notes for the machine, and it's a cool 11180 words. At some point, it turned out that the display my unit uses was not in the list of known displays for the x13s. Seems that was mostly inconsequential aside from a kernel warning and maybe slower wakeup. Helped upstream with that, which eventually resulted in this commit: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3330b71caff6cdc387f...

I'm no stranger to exotic architectures and machines, having used Gentoo on a ppc64le machine as a daily driver for 3+ years. And I do like the laptop. But w/o fundamental improvements to the way ARM bringup works, not just improvements for individual machines, I wouldn't recommend this stuff to any unsuspecting user.

Do you want to upgrade now or later? Will you upgrade now or do I need to nag you to death?

I'm gonna steal "Klaus Kode", that one really got me.

Assuming that the person pulling the disk doesn't have the passphrase, what's the difference?

Oh wow, that never occurred to me! TIL.

What's the benefit of using the TPM compared to a simple passphrase at boot, in that scenario?

I hold on to my precious few mini-Bs. They also seem to have a tendency to break.

In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.

The hubris of the courts can be stunning. Sorry from Germany.

And thanks for the great DNS service, I'm using it everywhere!

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Server hardware comes with VGA, because everything in the server room (think KVM switches, external remote KVM, local 19" consoles) is built with VGA. And that will be the case as long as server hardware comes with VGA.

A Fujitsu ARM Server for normal people that I can buy through a normal retail channel and boot a freakin' generic Linux ISO... that would be great!

(Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)

Well FINALLY!